The start of a dream...

It all started with a book... a very cute children's book to be exact.  

Three years ago I took my kids to the library to take out books to read at home.  My little one Mia chose a book called Maisey and the Pirates - the ghost ship, by UK author Sam Walshaw.  To be truthful, it was the Afrikaans translated version of the book, but for purposes of this blog, I will refer to the English version. That night she asked me to read the book to her at bed time and being the actress-mom I am, I of course did it with silly voices and lots of gestures and weird faces.

She laughed herself silly the whole way through and I had to repeat the process for two more nights.

By night three I was sitting with the book on my lap, looking at it and thinking "this would make a great children's theater show".  So I did something very scary for me... I looked up the author and actually CONTACTED her through her webpage, explained who I was, that I was involved in amateur theater in South Africa and that I would love to develop the book into a show.

For three months I heard nothing, so I basically gave up on the idea and kept myself busy as stage manager for an amateur theater company in our area.  Until one day when I opened up my emails and found a mail from the author Sam's publisher, Stuart Trotter from Rockpool Children's Books.  They LOVED my idea and had never even thought that such a thing could be done and gave me permission to go ahead, promising their support all the way.  I was ecstatic!  And then I realized my dilemma... I had no theater group to do the show with and no money to fund it.

They say man plans but God decides, and in my case He had decided that it was time that I realized my life-long dream of running a children's theater group.  So I contacted a few lady drama friends I'd gotten to know through various previous productions I'd worked on and asked them to come to my house for an idea I wanted to pitch to them.  On 16 April 2016, I told the founding members of what would become Drama Queen Productions about my dream of a Children's Theater company, which would also be a children's ministry group, and that I had gotten the rights to the books (there were 4 in total) from the author.  They all wanted to join me in this mad endeavor and so we founded our group.  We all agreed that our focus would be drama, music and puppetry for kids aged 3 to 14, to bring them the life giving message of God's word.  Along with this, we would work towards staging the books by Sam.

Choosing a name for the group was a challenge... nothing felt right to me.  We all suggested various ones, until I remembered a birthday card I once got, saying "happy birthday Drama Queen".  And it just... clicked.  More than just being drama queens in life, we made the attachment to the name that we were daughters of a most high God, our King, and that we used drama as our medium to spread our message to kids.

And so we were officially Drama Queen Productions... on our way to greatness!  I have so much more to tell you about our group, so more blogs about my queens will follow soon.